Imagining China from the West: A Tropological Genealogy of Chinese Representation in Popular Culture

I was first exposed to the issue of Chinese representations through the American media. Watching the President incite trade wars over Twitter, I sought information on the historical forces at play and instead discovered even more confounding stories. Students for Fair Admission had filed a lawsuit against Harvard for alleged discrimination against Asian Americans, I found, a case which ruled in favor of Harvard in September 2019 (Students for Fair Admissions). New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft faced charges for soliciting prostitution at Orchids of Asia Day Spa; his victims were almost entirely vulnerable Chinese immigrants (Dastagir). And a Top Pentagon official declared China a threat to the United States way of life, couching the conflict in terms of ideological competition (Gehrke). Inundated with such fearful messages of a rising power and a brewing struggle between the United States and China, unable to parse the opinion pieces on either side for an explanation of how we moved from Henry Kissinger to Donald Trump in our foreign relations policy, I at last turned to literary theory